


Walls

by stateofintegrity



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: M/M, Touch-Starved, psychiatrists doing more harm than good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:56:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26717122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stateofintegrity/pseuds/stateofintegrity
Summary: Both Klinger and Winchester have had barriers placed between them and the rest of the world.
Relationships: Maxwell Klinger/Charles Emerson Winchester III
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8





	Walls

Everyone said that Klinger was straight. 

That they needed to say so (so very often) made Charles question their motives… but prejudice was hardly a new facet in his life. 

The truth was, he didn’t  _ want  _ the pretty Corporal to be straight. 

Even if he never got to share his own truth (or, at the very center of his fantasies:  _ touch _ the man), it would be very nice to feel just a little less alone. Agnosticism prevented him from calling on God (if He  _ did  _ exist, He didn’t believe in Charles Emerson Winchester- at least not the most recent version), but he hoped, strongly and often, that he might see some sign that Klinger wasn’t 100% completely heterosexual. 

Unfortunately, when the moment came, his brain piped up and accused him of wish fulfillment. But later he replayed the interaction - and hoped even harder. 

It had taken place in the Swamp. Klinger had been tapped by Potter to get him to Kimpo to fly out for a demonstration of new surgical techniques (the same old noose that had  _ gotten  _ him to Asia and thence to the 4077th), and his couture chauffeur was helping him pack. As the final articles were placed inside a leather satchel, their hands brushed. 

“Nice hands, Major. I’m a sucker for soft ones...”

Charles looked up. “Pardon?”

“Oh, I mean, I just know how cracked and dry they can get from washing so much... Hawkeye complains about it a lot.”

And perhaps there really was no more to it than that… but Charles  _ really _ wanted there to be. In fact, he would have loved nothing more than to engage in a side by side comparison of Klinger’s callused, dice-throwing hands and his soft, long-fingered ones. The thought made him bite back a moan. 

And then an idea cropped up. 

It was a crazy idea- a thing worthy of (he shuddered to think it)  _ Pierce  _ … but it wasn’t illegal… or even  _ that  _ immoral. He felt the thing unfurling behind his eyes like a black rose. 

He waited until he went off rounds on a quiet night. In the office, he spread out a handful of files and papers as convenient camouflage just in case someone came in and had questions about the information he was about to tiptoe through. He put the latest supply notes for the blood bank right on top… then quickly got the file he wanted before he could change his mind. 

For the next 37 minutes, Charles read about the man for whom he had so unexpectedly fallen. Among the shiny and interesting tidbits he initially added to his mental nest like a jackdaw were these: 

  1. The Q. in Maxwell Klinger was an Americanization of al-Qurḥah. 
  2. Klinger was much younger than he was… which added to the guilt he already so readily felt. 
  3. The man’s eye color was, idiotically, listed as “brown.” As someone who watched Klinger’s eyes with something between manic fervor and religious devotion, Charles would have challenged this lackluster descriptor with every bit of his bombastic passion. Mud was brown. Barnyard hens were brown. Klinger’s eyes were pecan syrup and black walnut, the bey highlights of good horseflesh, black cognac before the ice melted… 



He sat up and shook his head. The action didn’t mitigate the obsession he was smack in the middle of, but it did allow him to keep reading. 

_ What do you think you’ll find?  _ his brain taunted him.  _ You know there aren’t physical signs like they told you long ago after they’d hurt you. It’s half the reason you went to medical school! To learn, for yourself, to learn for good, that no one can  _ **_see_ ** _ it in you or hear it in your voice!  _

This didn’t keep him from reading, though, and the farther back he went, the more interesting it all became. It seemed that Henry Blake had put in to the States for Klinger’s complete medical file. No note indicated why, but Charles suspected it had to do with the report that followed detailing the attempts of Majors Burns and Houlihan (their fifth) to have Klinger booted out as a degenerate. The next report was Sidney’s, and it contained Klinger’s refusal to “go through life on high heels,” which rocked Charles back on his own heels a bit. Maybe he really was all alone here. 

Then a name caught his eye - a doctor he knew by reputation if not through any actual introduction. He dug into his memory until the word “neonatological” was unearthed. But what had the man’s specialty been? High risk births? No. That didn’t secure one a place in medical textbooks. 

_ Preemies _ . 

That was it. The littlest babies - creatures so small they could not breathe on their own, or nurse - this doctor had fought the eugenicists who said such tiny things were better off not being born. He’d kept them alive by exhibiting them like carnival freaks (a compromise he had disliked intensely) and the attention had led to donations to develop another, better incubator, allowing what he called his “fairy-small babies” to survive. 

And one of his pint-sized patients had been Maxwell Q. Klinger. Born nearly  _ four months _ too early, Klinger had managed, at birth, the nearly impossible feat of breathing on his own for forty-eight hours.  _ Strong and stubborn even then,  _ Winchester thought admiringly. 

But this auspicious beginning hadn’t been without cost. Klinger had lung scarring from those early days and he had spent them in a glass box, essentially untouched except for the medical personnel trying to keep him alive. 

_ We’re alike,  _ Charles thought, delighted and horrified. Winchester was touch-starved because his parents had been distant and because they had given him over to psychiatrists who had brutalized him. Klinger had been denied initial and basic affection because he’d been too small to care for or hold. Didn’t they both deserve to have these deficits erased? 

_ I will take care of you _ , he thought giddily.  _ I will give you anything - everything - you want. Starting with a discharge.  _

***

BJ turned toward his CO without quite meaning to; some part of him knew that something was wrong before Potter spoke. Peg liked to call him her everyday empath, a title that always got him to roll his hazel eyes. “You okay, Colonel? You’re walking like you’ve got a 2-ton gorilla banging cymbals behind your eyes.”

The corners of those eyes crinkled at that. “You and Pierce always do pick me up when you start cutting up,” he admitted. “And your diagnosis ain’t too shabby, either. But what’s causing my headache isn’t a gorilla - but a  _ fella _ . Two of ‘em, actually.”

As far as Hunnicutt knew, Hawkeye wasn’t actively up to anything. Of course, he’d been out of his sight for more than fifteen minutes, so things could have changed. Best to play it neutral. “Oh?”

Potter explained that Winchester was on a crusade, “Real Katie bar the door kinda stuff,” said Potter, “to liberate Klinger, no less. Seems he dug up some stuff in the kid’s medical file that’d make him a shoe in for a 4-F.” 

“Listening to Winchester for longer than fifteen minutes gives me a headache, too,” Hunnicutt confided. “But I thought you liked Klinger. If Charles is on to something, can’t you let him out?” Not that he had a clue  _ why  _ Charles would care about Klinger - in or out of the Army. 

Potter sighed. “I wish I could. Winchester’s right - the kid should never have been drafted. But from what I can see, Lt. Col. Henry Blake had the  _ same  _ information. He tried to get the boy sprung - more than once. I don’t know why, but the higher ups have got it in for Klinger. Maybe it’s those photos of his, or maybe they’ve got a grudge against someone in his family. Maybe they lost money in oil stocks for all I know - the boy is an Arab - but they aren’t letting him out.” 

“You told Charles all this?” 

“Every word. But he’s got his dander up.”

“So what are you going to do?” 

“I’m sending the Don Quioxte of the Old Bay State up to Seoul. Either he’ll come back with discharge papers or he’ll come back blown about by the windmills - but either way, it’s out of my hair.”

“Does Klinger know?”

“Not a word. And I do like the boy, so let’s keep this under our saddle blankets. No sense getting his hopes up for nothing.” 

***

Potter’s predictions proved true enough - and when Winchester returned to the camp he pulled a real Margaret Houlihan: kicking at oil cans and tires, snapping at anyone ranked lower than Macarthur, and nearly taking three different doors off of the hinges in his rage. He was so bitter over the whole thing he even thought of asking his father for help. Sure, he detested the man… but getting Max out of the army might save his life. 

What Charles (and his CO) had not counted on was that it was impossible to keep a secret at the 4077th. 

Winchester returned a failed knight. But he  _ also  _ returned to a Corporal dressed in a gown so delicately colored that it seemed to be made of sea glass caressed by fingers of foam. Moonlight picked out irregular flakes of silver that appeared errantly tinsel-tossed onto the fabric but which were, Charles knew as he ached to touch them in pure praise, artfully placed. 

He tried to joke; joking had saved him in the past. “Corporal? Your sentry costumes will have the North Koreans asking you to dance.” 

“I’m not on sentry duty, Major. I was waiting for you.” 

It was very sweet to hear. It didn’t mean what he wanted it to, but, music lover that he was, Charles still rejoiced in the act of listening, the cadence of that long loved voice. “Oh?”  _ What can a lung surgeon who cannot convince anyone that your lungs should not be drawing breath  _ **_here_ ** _ do for you, beautiful?  _

“I… I want to fall asleep tonight… I mean, I want, if I wake up scared, to be able to put my head on your chest and just hear your heart. Is that okay?” 

It was far more than that… but Winchester needed to know what, precisely, had motivated this unexpected change. “Max?”

“I can never sleep here… but I think it would feel safer with you. I mean, if you want? I won’t tell anyone, so you don’t have to worry about the Captains giving you a hard time.” 

“You are asking me this, I assume, because I endeavored to affect your escape?”

“No. But if you tried, that must mean you like me okay, right?”

Asked directly, with those dark eyes looking up at him, what else could he do? In a soft voice, he said, “Maxwell, darling, I love you as I have never loved anyone in the wide world. I did not know that I was capable. But my feelings should create no obligation in you.” 

That obligation bit was plain sad, but Klinger wanted to find out about something else first. “You didn’t think you could love anybody? How come?” 

Charles dropped his eyes, but his fondness for the pretty thing increased. Klinger  _ was _ tender-hearted. “It is nothing to trouble you, Maxwell.” 

“C’mon, Major. I  _ want _ your trouble. You tried to fix mine.” He grinned his thanks; he was clearly beyond impressed at Charles’ bungled attempt at chivalry. 

“I failed badly.” 

“I might, too. You’re rich and fancy and a hell of a lot smarter than me, so maybe I can’t help. You should still lemme try.”

That was how the touch-starved Major ended up in an army cot holding onto a man in a dress, telling the sad story of the broken places within him and how they had become that way. “You see, Max, and I shall beg your pardon if you wish it, I have known little of touch for the entirety of my life. I thought I was well shut of it… until I saw you. I… I could not approach you, of course,” 

Maxwell had his strong hands wrapped around Charles’ unsteady ones and had drawn them to his chest. “How come? The guy thing? Your family?” 

“No, darling. Those things have served as fine excuses to keep myself set apart before, but this time… Maxwell, I am  _ wrong _ for you in a myriad of ways. The legal ones do not trouble me. Nor does my rank, as we both know you do not take my orders under anything more serious than advisement.” They shared a smile at that. 

“Maybe you’ve been giving me the wrong kind, Major baby.”

Charles shivered;  _ that _ was nice, and its rapid manifestation suggested that it might not be brand new. He vowed to ask later. “Perhaps. Nonetheless, Maxwell, you are very young and impossibly pretty in dresses and in fatigues, the latter a feat that ought to be saluted given what you have to work with, and you have the warmest heart I have ever encountered. I would have sought only for your friendship, I swear it, but I thought I could find something in your file that might get you sent home so you could be happy again.” 

“You like all my clothes, you wanna be my friend, and you tried to send me to Toledo?” He grinned for all he was worth. “Tell me again why you’re so wrong for me?”

Charles began to, but his words were barricaded by an enthusiastic kiss that was short on technique, maybe, but very, very eager to learn - more eager still to make him part his lips for a taste. Charles didn’t intend to do more than accept what he had been given, but one hand went to the small of Klinger’s back to pull him close. The other cupped his face, stroked his hair away from the eyes it sought to fall into. 

“Y-you needn’t..,” he said shakily when Max drew back. Both of their chests were heaving. 

“Don’t say stupid things.” Adjusting his skirt, Max settled into his lap and let one leg encircle his waist. 

Charles looked like he wanted to hide. “Max… I don’t… I can’t…” It had been so long. And if he lost  _ this _ by failing to please his new, young lover… it was a vision too bleak to be endured. 

“Don’t think them either. Your eyes are too pretty to be that worried.” 

“I am afraid I will not know what to do. That I will fail you.”  _ Lose you.  _

“Major, how much of that file did you read?” 

“I got distracted, obviously, by the thoracic elements.” Little good as his expertise had done. It hurt. 

Klinger nodded. “And you know we do physicals every three months?”

“Yes.”

“One of the things you ask at those is number of sexual partners, right?”

It was; the army fought on two fronts: the one with tanks and the one with camp followers. Klinger saw his bright, handsome surgeon begin to get a clue. Smiling he nodded him on and made a circle of his thumb and finger: a zero. 

Charles looked at those joined fingers. “I understood you to be married.”

“Over a phone. Which turned out not to be the best idea. The only frisky thing that ever came out of that was a busy signal, Major.” 

Realizing he was being teased, Charles burst out laughing. “Maxwell!” 

“What? It’s making your day, isn’t it?” He could read that proud, possessive grin. “You get to be the whole story if you want, which seems like a real Winchester kinda thing, and we can go slow and figure this out together.” 

Charles closed his lovely eyes a moment. 

He imagined the incubator that had kept Maxwell alive, its glassy walls separating him from those first and most basic touches. 

He thought of the asylum walls behind which his family had attempted to forever confine him. 

As they touched, all the walls, old and new, began to come tumbling down. 

End! 


End file.
